A Case Against Killing Your Darlings

I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings.

The phrase “kill your darlings” is a lifelong foe. I’ve never quite understood it, prevalent as the idea can be. I take the injunction to mean I should get rid of the best parts of what I’m working on: the lines I feel especially alive while rereading, the metaphors so bewitching it seems possible I, too, along with the language, might be transfigured.

To which I say: fuck, no. Absolutely not. Why would I cut, let alone kill, that which most delights me?

I refuse, so here’s what I believe: I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings. I don’t want any published novel of mine to include a single line that bores me, that hasn’t been shaped, pressed, and attentively loved into the most truthful, living version of itself. I might even argue that it’s not possible to care too much about language, about punctuation. I am close to believing, at least with my own work, that a single misplaced comma is enough to risk bringing down an entire book. One careless line is a death knell; a paragraph, utter ruin.

Not everyone believes this, of course, which is as it should be. The house of fiction is large; it holds infinite rooms, and if you’re a writer, part of your life’s work will be learning what holds true inside your own, uniquely splendid room. Which you’ll figure out by reading a lot and writing, but especially reading. It’s how I started better understanding what kind of writing I had to try to write: I realized I usually decide which book I’ll read next by glancing at a few lines from the middle of the text. If those lines sing to me, I’ll then flip to the beginning and read the book; if I can’t hear the lines’ singing, I’ll put down the book and try the next one in the pile.

So, I started applying that same test to my own writing. With my first novel, The Incendiaries, each time I’d finished a draft, I would read it through, pull out the lines I loved, put them in a new document, then start again. I did that for the first god knows how many drafts; by the end, I’d written fifty novel drafts, eighty, I have no idea, and I don’t want to know.

Only when I had a more substantial draft did I start working with the words I had in place, trying to pull every phrase, line, and page up to the level at which the so-called darlings, like higher beings, already existed. I knew I might have finished The Incendiaries when I could open the book at random, read a few lines, and not feel compelled to revise it all over again.